BIO

Grey Von Cannon (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Charlottesville, VA where she works full-time as a studio artist. She holds a BFA in Metalsmithing and Painting from Appalachian State University where she began collaborating with painting and metalsmithing to create succinct works of art. She unites fragile sculptures with raw, expressive paintings to explore vulnerability, home and identity.

STATEMENT

Grey Von Cannon’s work creates an all encompassing world of highly pigmented, confrontational color, fragmented bodies, and fleshy fruits. She invents alternative spaces for the expression of womanhood that exist outside of the conventional, socially-defined categories of femininity.  Conventional modes of representing femininity are designed to be gender exclusionary – to limit who sees themselves reflected in that representation. Grey’s work is an invitation to all who identify with any aspect of the femme spectrum to see themselves in the work. It accomplishes this by avoiding expected, naturalistic color palettes and potentially exclusionary geographical or physical, limiting contexts. This work is also an invitation to those who do not identify with femininity. It asks those viewers to consider a different way of seeing and interacting with femininity than they have been taught. 

Grey sees the body as its own home and finds freedom in identity that exists beyond a gendered home space. She makes worlds in which her corporeal form is used as the subject for her paintings, thus deepening the intimacy with and vulnerability of their existence. Grey has learned to develop a relationship with the unknown and embrace floating in between belonging and seeking; always choosing openness.